Month: February 2026

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How Sean Penn saved a man trapped in a Bolivian prison

Sean Penn always knew that rescuing Jacob Ostreicher from his years of Bolivian imprisonment would be difficult. Ostreicher, a then-52-year-old Hasidic businessman who had moved to the country from Brooklyn to manage a rice farm, got stuck there for two and a half years after he was accused of money laundering and criminal organization. His detainment in one of Bolivia’s most brutal prisons had attracted international attention — ABC News’ Nightline had run a segment about his incarceration; it was covered by the New York Times, the BBC, the Associated Press, and the Bolivian and Jewish press. It seemed like he would never get back to the States. Until suddenly, in December 2013, he returned. The Bolivian justice minister claimed Ostreicher had slipped away while out of prison on house arrest. Chaya Gitty Weinberger, Ostreicher’s daughter, told the Times that her father had been “dropped off in Pacific waters,” then released — but only after her uncle had negotiated a ransom. A State Department spokesperson would only confirm to news organizations that Ostreicher was in the United States. What really happened remained a mystery. (via NY mag)

This Nobel Prize winner’s invention can generate pure drinking water from the air

A Nobel laureate’s environmentally friendly invention that provides clean water if central supplies are knocked out by a hurricane or drought could be a life saver for vulnerable islands, its founder says. The invention, by the chemist Prof Omar Yaghi, uses a type of science called reticular chemistry to create molecularly engineered materials, which can extract moisture from the air and harvest water even in arid and desert conditions. Atoco, a company that Yaghi founded, said its units, comparable in size to a 20ft shipping container and powered entirely by ultra-low-grade thermal energy, could be placed in local communities to generate up to 1,000 litres of clean water every day, even if centralised electricity and water sources were interrupted by drought or storm damage. Yaghi, who won the 2025 Nobel prize in chemistry, said the invention would change the world and benefit islands in the Caribbean. (via The Guardian)

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He woke up in the morgue but went on to win the horse race

Ralph Neves was understandably disoriented when he woke up in the morgue. The slab was cold and the tag around his toe pressing into the skin. His heart, declared stopped an hour before, was racing so hard it was nearly beating out of his chest. The last thing Neves remembered, he was riding a horse at Bay Meadows on May 8, 1936. He looked down and saw one bare foot, one still in his riding boot and blood all over his pants. But he could deal with that later. Bing Crosby had promised the winningest jockey of the season a $500 gold watch. And 19-year-old Ralph wanted that watch, whatever the cost. He hobbled out of the morgue, a retinue of shocked doctors and nurses on his heels. He spotted a train station nearby and made a break for it. Parked there was a taxi driver; Neves hopped in, and told the driver to get him back to the racetrack. (via SFGate)

Mystery surrounds a metal “book” found in a Jordanian cave which could be centuries old

An exhaustive scientific analysis conducted on the  — a collection of metal books that were reportedly found in a cave in Jordan and made public in March 2011, generating since then an intense debate between supporters of their ancient origin and those who consider them a forgery — has succeeded in offering the most detailed assessment to date of their origin, without being able to definitively resolve the controversy but opening a crucial door to their possible antiquity. The study, led by the Ion Beam Centre at the University of Surrey and published in a scientific journal, concludes that the tests conducted do not allow the objects to be conclusively dated beyond 200 years, but they also cannot demonstrate that they are a modern fabrication, leaving their provenance in a zone of scientific uncertainty that requires further investigation. (via La Brujula Verde)

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Are prediction markets fueling a gambling epidemic?

The term “prediction market” sounds so scientific, doesn’t it? Like “derivatives,” the financial instrument they resemble. On platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, people place a bet on the likelihood of certain outcomes, whether political or sporting or anything else (want to bet on whether Jesus will return this year?). But the term “bet” in the previous sentence reveals what prediction markets actually are: Betting. In other words, gambling. Is that bad? After all, the stock market is a form of betting, and millions of people trade stocks. The same goes for other markets — currencies, commodities, etc. Derivatives like “puts” and “calls” let you bet on whether a certain stock will rise or fall without having to actually buy or sell it; instead, what you buy is the option to buy or sell it at some future date. You can also hedge bets by selling a stock “short,” meaning you borrow shares and then sell them, assuming that the price is going to fall.

Sounds like gambling, doesn’t it? However, it is also regulated, and in the past, traders needed to pass a variety of tests to engage in it, and investors had to pass certain requirements before they would be taken on as clients. The investment industry was in many ways a kind of priesthood. Over time, the barriers to trading stocks and pretty much anything else have been steadily lowered — thanks in part to regulation, and in part to the internet. Now, anyone can open an e-trading account and trade stocks with the click of a button on a mobile app. Firms like Robinhood have become huge by offering this ability to anyone, no matter how ignorant they might be about the stock market, and the result has been a kind of viral storm around certain “meme” stocks, with GameStop being the poster child. In 2021 it soared in value based largely on vibes.

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A murder so preposterous that stupidity was used as a defense

Oliver Karafa and Yun Lu “Lucy” Li were a perfect match. Karafa was the consummate pretty boy: his brown hair always coiffed just so, his tennis shoes pristine. With no post-secondary education and little job experience, he told whomever would listen that he was going to be a millionaire before he was 30. His wife, Li, had the looks and dimensions of a Kardashian: arched brows, high cheekbones, Barbie waistline. Her chosen path to fame was TikTok. She was part of a set of fraternal triplets who posed in lingerie and spoke little. Karafa and Li came from well-off families, and they wanted to expand on what their parents had achieved. Whereas that success had required sacrifice, however, Karafa and Li were looking for shortcuts. When Karafa’s and Li’s ambitions were threatened, they would go to horrific lengths to protect them. (via Toronto Life)

This Malaysian businessman stole $4.5 billion from a state company and then disappeared

Taek Jho Low is a Malaysian businessman and fugitive who has been wanted by Interpol since 2016 for his key role in the 1MDB scandal. Low is alleged to have stolen over US$4.5 billion from the state-owned company. He has maintained his innocence and contends that Malaysian authorities are engaging in a campaign of harassment and political persecution due to his prior support of former prime minister Najib Razak. Low allegedly purchased a US$325,000 white Ferrari as a wedding gift for Kim Kardashian in 2011. The Department of Justice (DoJ) was reported to have sought restitution from other famous celebrities who had received gifts from Low, among them Leonardo DiCaprio, who has since returned the Picasso and Basquiat paintings he was given; and Miranda Kerr who returned diamond jewellery with a value of US$8 million. (via Wikipedia)

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A teenaged girl struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in 1931

When World War II came to America, baseball was one of the early victims. Many Major League players were in their early 20s and, therefore, subject to the draft. the owner of the Cubs, Philip K. Wrigley (of chewing gum fame) started the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1943. While many know about the AAGPBL due to the 1992 movie A League of Their Own, few realize that women played professional, minor league baseball until 1931. That year,  a young woman named Jackie Mitchell ended women’s hopes of breaking into the big leagues. How? By striking out Babe Ruth. And, for good measure, she struck out Lou Gehrig too. Ruth, then 36 years old and on the downside of his career, led the league in home runs with 46 – but it was a tie. The other guy to also hit 46 homers was Gehrig, a 28 year old first baseman, and Ruth’s teammate on the New York Yankees. (via Now I Know)

The name of the Chicxulub meteor crater was chosen because it’s hard to pronounce

The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is offshore, but the crater is named after the onshore community of Chicxulub Pueblo. It was formed slightly over 66 million years ago when an asteroid, about ten kilometers in diameter, struck Earth. The crater is estimated to be 200 kilometers in diameter and is buried to a depth of about 1 kilometer beneath younger sedimentary rocks. It is one of the largest impact structures on Earth. The crater was discovered by Antonio Camargo and Glen Penfield, geophysicists who had been looking for petroleum in the Yucatán Peninsula during the late 1970s. Hildebrand, Penfield, Boynton, Camargo, and others published their paper identifying the crater in 1991. Penfield recalled that part of the motivation for the name Chicxulub was “to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it” after years of dismissing its existence. (via Wikipedia)

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He wrote a murder mystery and now his death has become one

More than halfway through the crime novel he wrote, Robert Fuller describes the frustration of a detective locked in a mystery. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Now what?” he said aloud. It has been a week since someone made their way into Fuller’s assisted living apartment in Potomac, Maryland, police say, and fatally shot the 87-year-old millionaire in the head. Authorities released surveillance video Friday of a suspect walking on the facility’s grounds the morning of Feb. 14 around the time Fuller was killed. The video shows the back of a slender person wearing dark pants with long dark hair flowing over a yellowish checkered shirt. Investigators hope someone will recognize the shirt or the person’s gait, produced as if they’re favoring one foot. Detectives don’t know if the person depicted is a man or woman, was acting alone or what their motive was. (via MSN)

A colonel in the Mexican revolution was born female but lived as man for 70 years

Amelio Robles Ávila was a colonel during the Mexican Revolution. Assigned female at birth, Robles lived openly as a man from age 24 until his death at age 95. From a young age, Robles showed an interest in activities that were considered masculine, learning to tame horses and handling weapons, and becoming an excellent marksman and rider. Robles gained the respect of peers and superiors as a capable military leader, and was eventually given his own command. According to historians, Robles adopted a male identity not as a survival strategy but because of a strong desire to be a man. Robles’s male identity was accepted by family, society, and the Mexican government. According to a former neighbor, if anyone called Robles a woman or Doña (an honorific for women, similar to English Lady), he would threaten them with a pistol. (via Wikipedia)

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The humanities are about to be automated

Referencing my desire to disprove that AI is “merely a stochastic parrot,” Claude told me that “political theory may be the one field where ‘stochastic parrot’ is actually a compliment, since the whole discipline consists of creatively recombining things Tocqueville and Mill already said.” Ouch.

Professors at top universities are — in good part because of what it now takes to get a good job in the field — more focused on publishing erudite contributions to niche debates in scholarly journals which only a handful of their colleagues will ever read than on teaching and mentoring the ever-dwindling ranks of their students.

Yascha Mounk gets an AI to write an academic paper in political theory and says the result is more or less indistinguishable from papers written by experts in the field

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There are thousands of secret tunnels throughout Europe

Around 2,000 strange tunnels have been found around central Europe. These aren’t like the well-known catacombs of Paris or Rome. Known as the erdstall, these passages are extremely narrow, never more than two feet wide nor high enough for an adult to walk in, and sometimes the passages become seemingly impossibly narrow, with some as small as 16 inches in diameter. Determining their age and purpose is made difficult by the fact that almost no archaeological evidence has been found inside any of them. A ploughshare was found in one, millstones in a couple others, but apart from that the erdstall are eerily empty. Carbon analyses of coal and pottery fragments found within point to construction dates of around 900 to 1200 AD, but no written records from the Middle Ages mention the erdstall’s existence. (via Weird Medieval Guys)

A Great Dane was awarded a medal in World War II for peeing on an explosive device

Animals have played pivotal roles on the front lines of many battles. Horses, elephants, and even dolphins have been employed for their strength, intelligence, and adaptability. During World War II, one brave animal stood out as a hero for using an unlikely defense tactic against the enemy: her urine. Juliana was the name of a Great Dane who had even greater instincts. In April 1941, amid the ongoing German bombing campaign known as the Blitz, explosives rained down across the U.K. When a bomb fell through the roof of the house where Juliana lived with her owner, the fast-acting pooch made her way over to the incendiary device and extinguished its flame by urinating on it. Juliana’s bravery earned her a medal from the Blue Cross. (via History Facts)

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Is it bad that Anthropic doesn’t know if Claude is conscious?

It’s the kind of headline that might seem either like a hypothetical philosophical concern, or a deeply worrying revelation, depending on how you feel about AI: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said the company is “no longer sure whether Claude is conscious.” On the one hand, whether an AI is or is not “conscious” could be seen as a question for the philosophically inclined, or for psychologists and other academics who specialize in such things. Does it really matter? What do we even mean when we say something is conscious? It’s a grey area (literally, as in grey matter). At the same time, however, it’s at least mildly concerning that a company that has been building and releasing sophisticated AI doesn’t really know what it has created. Do we need to be worried about Claude or any other significantly developed artificial intelligence achieving human-like consciousness and then doing something we might not like? Anthropic says it doesn’t think so, but also admits that it doesn’t really know.

Like it or not, this is where we are when it comes to AI. And if we’re looking for things to be optimistic about, I think Anthropic at least deserves some credit for being so forthcoming about the risks and rewards of its AI engines, and for providing a vast amount of detail about the machinery underneath Claude’s hood (which is more than other AI companies are doing). The company’s so-called “system cards,” which might sound like flash cards handed out at press conferences, are 300-page documents that list the tests and challenges Claude has either passed or failed, along with any concerns about things like “deceptive behavior,” where the AI says one thing and does another.

Anthropic also employs a number of risk-oriented and ethics-focused staffers who pay attention to such things, along with an in-house philosopher named Amanda Askell, whose job is to train Claude to be a decent artificial person, whatever that means. Presumably exterminating the human race is off the table! All that said, however, there are definitely some elements of what is happening at Anthropic (and presumably elsewhere, since Claude isn’t dramatically different than ChatGPT or Gemini or any of the other AI engines) that are… worth considering. As Futurism noted in its piece about whether Claude is conscious:

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This tiny island had a coup almost every year for 24 years

“You know that island between Mozambique and Madagascar that you visited,” she said. “Was it called Anjouan? Well, there’s been a coup.” Actually, there had been 24 coups in as many years, the pace accelerating after 1997 and culminating with two in 2001. On an island no bigger than the Isle of Wight, this means that a significant proportion of the adult population has indulged in some storming of the presidential palace, albeit usually short-lived. To be honest, any able-bodied person with some pluck and peripheral vision stands a good chance: the Maoist revolutionary, Ali Soilih, took over in 1975 armed with little more than the spokes from a bicycle wheel; the French mercenary, Bob Denard, succeeded 20 years later with a dozen soldiers all aged over 60. When I left to sail to Anjouan, an ex-Foreign Legion man warned me that, despite being an unarmed lone traveller, I would be viewed as an invasion force. (via The Guardian)

Evolutionary scientists say the human chin is a biological accident

Absent from other primates — and even Denisovans and Neanderthals — the bony, protruding chin is a uniquely human characteristic. As such, it’s tempting to indulge in another uniquely human trait and come up with a reason it was honed by natural selection. Supporting the lower jaw to facilitate chewing or acting as a secondary sexual characteristic to advertise maturity to mates, are two such stories. To investigate theories of the evolution of the chin, researchers examined gene sequences involved in the development of the head and jaw for evidence of evolution. Specifically, the team looked at whether sequences involved in producing the chin itself were subject to direct selection, whether they arose neutrally due to genetic drift, or whether they were merely a byproduct of evolution acting upon other traits (a spandrel). They found that the evidence pointed toward the chin being an accident. (via Nautilus)

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ALS stole his voice but AI let him sing again one more time

There are tears in the audience as Patrick Darling’s song begins to play. It’s a heartfelt song written for his great-grandfather, whom he never got the chance to meet. But this performance is emotional for another reason: It’s Darling’s first time on stage with his bandmates since he lost the ability to sing two years ago. The 32-year-old musician was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) when he was 29 years old, which affects the nerves that supply the body’s muscles. People with ALS eventually lose the ability to control their muscles, including those that allow them to move, speak, and breathe. Darling’s last stage performance was over two years ago. By that point, he had already lost the ability to stand and play his instruments and was struggling to sing or speak. But recently, he was able to re-create his lost voice using an AI tool trained on snippets of old audio recordings. (via MIT Tech Review)

A woman lived undetected inside the sign on top of a Michigan store for more than a year

A woman who had been living in a sign of a Michigan grocery store for about a year was captured on police body cam footage telling police it was a “safe spot” for her to live. The saga began about a month ago when a contractor working on the roof of the Family Fare store in Midland noticed an extension cord running into a door on the back of the sign. When he opened the door, he was greeted by the 34-year-old woman. Officer Brennon Warren of the Midland Police Department told The Associated Press that the woman had made herself quite comfortable in the sign’s approximate 40-square feet. “There was some flooring that was laid down. A mini desk,” he said. “Her clothing. A Keurig coffee maker. A printer and a computer — things you’d have in your home.” Police did not name the woman, but said she was cooperative and agreed to leave. She was not charged with any crimes. the woman told officers she’d been living in the sign for about a year, but officers never learned how she was accessing the roof every day. (via Global News)

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Mysterious Chinese couple have dozens of surrogate kids

In the delicate jargon of the fertility industry, a woman who carries a child for someone else is said to be going on a “journey.” Kayla Elliott began hers in February, 2024. Elliott already had four children, but she was intrigued by the prospect of bearing another. She’d loved the natural rush of pregnancy and as a surrogate, she could earn money for her family.Within days, Elliott received a brief message from Mark Surrogacy, an agency in Los Angeles, who wanted to know if she was interested in working with a Chinese couple. She was sent a dating-style profile with a photo of a paunchy sixty-four-year-old, Guojun Xuan, with his arm draped around a woman identified as his wife, Silvia, who was thirty-six and had short-cropped black hair. They lived in Arcadia, an affluent city in L.A. County, and shared a daughter who, they said, longed for a sibling. Then another surrogate, who lived in Pennsylvania, shared something she’d heard about the couple: they already had thirteen children. (via the New Yorker)

In the 1800s the Iron Riders all-Black infantry corps bicycled almost 2,000 miles

In 1897, the all-Black 25th Infantry Regiment Bicycle Corps embarked on an epic ride of more than 1,900 miles from Fort Missoula, Montana, to St. Louis, Missouri, as part of an experiment by the U.S. Army to determine the effectiveness of moving troops by bicycle. Called “The Great Experiment” in national newspapers, the journey took 41 days to complete. The route was chosen specifically to experience as many different conditions, climates and landscape formations as possible. The 25th Infantry was one of six racially segregated units formed by the Army after the Civil War. Soldiers in these units were required to continuously prove themselves to their white counterparts because of the perception that Black soldiers were inferior in courage and ability. Members of the Bicycle Corps demonstrated the opposite was true. (via Missouri State Parks)

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